With continuously increasing demand in energy such as electricity and water, various resource providers such as power suppliers and water companies are resorting ways of using available resources more efficiently with new technologies. Instead of broadcasting power, a smart grid, which is recently proposed technology, is designed to monitor and distribute electrical power more efficiently. The proposed smart grid technology, for example, is able to create an intelligent power monitoring system capable of tracking electricity flow between users and power suppliers. To use power more efficiently, home appliances such as washing machines can be selectively activated in accordance with electrical load profiles reported by the smart grid. The smart grid is also known as smart electric grid, smart power grid, intelligent grid, FutureGrid, intergrid, intragrid, et cetera.
To effectively distribute the power, a critical aspect is communications of power usage or power consumption between consumers and providers whereby the providers can use the smart grid to distribute the power according to the consumption or demand. The smart grid, for example, may use a central database of power grid to keep track of the power consumption wherein the central database is being updated frequently or continuously. To monitor power consumption, a mechanism of transporting the consumption data or load profile collected by measure devices from each end user to the head end such as power supply(s) is needed. Conventional measuring devices such as electricity meters or water meters are commonly placed at residential and/or business facilities. Collecting the consumption data or load profile related to power usage has been a challenging and difficult task for power companies.
Traditionally, electricity meter readings (or legacy electricity meters) are done manually where technicians travel onsite to each of the electricity meter and copy down kilowatts and hour utilization, and then the recorded data is manually brought back to the head end for processing. To enhance readability of electricity meter, low power radio signals, such as Bluetooth and IrDA (Infrared Data Association), have been deployed to design new measuring devices, also known as smart meter, so that onsite manual reading can be avoided or reduced. To read the data from such newer electricity meters, a technician, however, still have to drive his/her specially equipped vehicle to each neighborhood and collect the data or load profile from the vehicles automatically once the vehicle reaches to the neighborhood.
A problem associated with the conventional method of collecting load profile or consumption data from a legacy meter or smart meter is that it is slow and time consuming.